Wow, that's a really great review and I'm thrilled you're having such a good time with the game. I think it's really unfortunate how much people generally seem to see the puzzle genre as being really stale and as little more than Tetris or Bejeweled clones, so I'm really glad to be playing a role in making something that differs from those in important and enjoyable ways. I think there's a lot of room for innovation in this genre, but it's very difficult to come up with fun, unique ideas. All too often you get something that is fun or unique, but not both, and in the cases where you do manage to achieve both of those, this is a genre where it's so easy to be overlooked because it's such an oversaturated market. There's definitely a trend toward cookie-cutter design with these games because that's easy and can pay off while finding a fun, unique game mechanic isn't easy and often doesn't pay off (I can name quite a few fantastic puzzle games no one's ever heard of that surely completely failed at market).
Regarding your issue with apparent slowdown on the adventure map, I believe that may be related to an issue with the Windows version that causes animation speeds to be twice as fast when the cursor is moving. This was very apparent with things like clouds, since they doubled in speed when moving the cursor. It's largely fixed in the latest release, but still appears in a couple places that should be fixed sometime soon, I'm sure. As for higher resolutions, the issue with that is that the background artwork is only so large, so any higher resolutions would require scaling things up or having a lot of dead space around the background. I'll let Chris speak more on that later (since there's probably more to say about it), but I think there are also some other posts about this on the forums somewhere.
Thanks for taking the time to type out your thoughts!